Disability rights activist Anita Cameron has been involved in social change activism and community organizing for 36 years. As a teenager, the 51-year old Chicago native joined peace and justice organizations and participated in nonviolent civil disobedience. In 1986, Anita joined ADAPT, a national, grassroots disability rights organization, and has been a member for 31 years, serving as a national organizer, strategist and police negotiator and is very proud of the fact that she has been arrested 124 times with ADAPT doing nonviolent civil disobedience after the style of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi.

Anita has had over thirty years of experience in transportation issues, beginning with her employment as a Transit Information Agent with the Chicago Transit Authority, where she first became aware of transportation issues affecting people with disabilities. Since then, she has served on numerous advisory committees on transportation issues affecting people with disabilities, seniors and low-income communities in Colorado, Washington, DC and New York. She helped to conduct two trainings in Indiana to riders with disabilities to form citizen oversight committees for their transit associations.

Because of her passion for disability rights, Anita has served on numerous Mayoral and Governor’s advisory boards and committees on people with disabilities around the nation.

Voting rights and accessibility for people with disabilities is a particular passion for Anita, who, as a Black woman, feels that because people died fighting for her right to vote, it is her duty to do so. She is proud of the fact that she has never missed a vote since age 18, and has fought for the right of people with disabilities not only to vote, but to serve in their communities. In 1992, she became the first person with disabilities to serve as an election judge for the city and county of Denver. She went on to serve as a poll worker in Washington, DC, while working as a disability vote organizer for the American Association of People with Disabilities. She has trained poll workers and precinct captains in voting access for people with disabilities and personally recruited almost 70 people with disabilities to serve as poll workers in Washington, DC.

Since her teens, Anita has fought for the civil and human rights for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender communities. She helped to get nondiscrimination legislation and ordinances in Chicago and Denver, helped craft a nondiscrimination policy for a Center for Independent Living and helped organize the first Gay Pride parade in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In 1993, she helped organize the 1993 March on Washington for Gay, Lesbian and Bi civil rights and was the national disability representative for the March.

Through her work in ADAPT, Anita has worked with numerous members of Congress, and was not only arrested in front of the White House, but personally invited there on two different occasions. She has met three sitting US presidents and two vice-presidents.

Anita has long experience in organizing marches and vigils in her work with ADAPT. In 2002, she organized a successful two-week vigil in Colorado to rescind deep cuts to home health reimbursement rates that would have sent thousands of people with disabilities to nursing homes. That led to the 144-mile Free Our People March from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, which Anita helped to organize. She wrote a nationally recognized guide on organizing vigils and has gone on to organize successful vigils in New York and Washington, DC.

Emergency Preparedness

Emergency Preparedness for people with disabilities is a deep passion for Anita, who became interested in emergency preparedness in 2004, while living in Washington, DC. She became a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) member in Washington, DC in 2005 and went on to help form the first disability integrated CERT class and team in Rochester, New York. She then went on to join Denver CERT, becoming a CERT instructor and CERT program manager. Anita has participated in numerous CERT exercises and real world events, including serving as a Radio Communication Operator at the Red Cross during the Colorado Flood of 2013. Anita recruited over 30 people with disabilities to serve as CERTs in Colorado and writes extensively about emergency preparedness and people with disabilities.

Writing

Anita is an accomplished writer and blogger who has served as a guest columnist for newspapers, magazines and blogs, writing mainly about issues affecting people with disabilities, including issues of discrimination, voting rights, transportation, opposition to physician assisted suicide and emergency preparedness. She has written for Yahoo! Voices, The Mobility Resource and The Huffington Post, and has been published in “Voices of A People’s History of the United States”, by the late, award winning historian, Howard Zinn. The book underwent a tenth anniversary reissue in 2014, which includes Anita’s original article, “And the Steps Came Tumbling Down: ADAPT’s Battle with the American Homebuilders’ Association”. Anita now blogs at Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, as well as her own blog, Angry Black Womyn.

Anita is Director of Minority Outreach at Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights organization that fights against physician assisted suicide and euthanasia of people with disabilities. She lives in Rochester, NY, with her wife, Lisa.